I discovered Opsound when it was mentioned over at Creative Commons. There was nothing more than an invitation to participate at Opsound for a long time; but the site is now filling up with free and legal MP3s. I have not listened to any of it yet though.

Opsound is a record label and sound pool using an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory for new ways of releasing music. Visit the Opsound Open Pool for free copyleft music downloads. Musicians and sound artists are invited to add their work to the pool.

… you are free (and encouraged) to download works, make copies, share them, include them in other works, remix and rearrange them, and even sell them.

Positron Records

believe that today’s independents release today’s music, while today’s corportate conglomerates release cross-promotional marketing campaigns that package artists with hamburgers. To them, artist is product, and product is disposable. To us, artist is label, and our aim is to make a contribution to the soundtrack of your life without picking your pocket in the process.

An audio stream is available. The music is mostly electronic.

Not just MP3s at Disquiet, but also audiostreams and videos. I will probably track down their recommendations at one stage. Free ambient/electronica is not exactly hard to find, one for the backlog.

The South by Southwest Music festival is in Austin, Texas every March. “Fest4Pod” is a massive 2.6GB/750+ tracks of free and legal SXSW 2005 tracks made available as a BitTorrent feed (or individual tracks). I am in the process of listening through it all.

I have made a fairly complete SXSW 2005 tracklisting available over at Halvorsen. If you like pop, listen to Bonnie Pink (sxsw) or try the latino-funk-hop of Cartel de Santa (sxsw) (as you can tell I have just made it to “D” in the alphabet).